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Brian Leiser of Anchorage displays a First Years Floatee duck found at Gore Point in mid-July. The duck came from a container spill in 1992, part of a set of toys lost at sea in the North Pacific.
Photo by Michael Armstrong

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Floats, buckets and barrels roped together show the extent of large marine debris collected this month at Gore Point.
Photo by Michael Armstrong

Bree Murhpy, left, and Marlaina Thiel, right, lift logs on the Gore Point east beach to get at marine debris buried in the thick piles of driftwood.

Photo by Michael Armstrong

In the rain forest of the Gore Point peninsula isthmus, olive-green moss covers spruce trees, turning them into a topiary garden. Lupines, irises and chocolate lilies bloom in a meadow hiding prehistoric house pits.

As you walk along a twisting path from the calmer west beach at the Port Dick side to the roaring surf facing the Gulf of Alaska on the east side, bright orange and blue colors  perhaps flowers?  appear among black sand on the forest floor. White fluff dusts thick devil's club. Turn a corner on the path near the east beach, and the "flowers" grow thicker. You soon realize the spots of color come not from nature, but from humans.

Floats, buckets and barrels roped together show the extent of large marine debris collected this month at Gore Point.

Photo by Michael Armstrong

Black rubber fenders the size of VW Beetles wrap around 100-foot tall trees. Floats and buoys the size of golf balls and larger lie among the logs. Four-eyed, 8-inch high-seas driftnet buoys fill the valleys between downed trees. Bottles with writing in languages from German to Korean testify to the international legacy of thousands of pounds of marine debris that have washed up at Gore Point.

"If any place is mystical and magical, this is the place," Raynor said. "It doesn't deserve to be buried in garbage."

Brian Leiser of Anchorage displays a First Years Floatee duck found at Gore Point in mid-July. The duck came from a container spill in 1992, part of a set of toys lost at sea in the North Pacific.

Photo by Michael Armstrong

Early last month, Homer volunteers went to the southern end of Kachemak Bay Wilderness State Park, a seven-hour, 75-mile boat ride from Homer down Cook Inlet, past Nanwalek, through the Chugach Passage and around the southernmost point of the Kenai Peninsula to the peninsula reaching out into the Gulf of Alaska like a lacrosse basket.

Since 2005, Gulf of Alaska Keeper, or GoAK  not affiliated with Cook Inletkeeper or other Keeper organizations  has been cleaning up beaches in Prince William Sound, mostly under federal grants through the Marine Conservation Alliance. The group that eventually formed GoAK started with volunteer efforts in 2001, and became a formal nonprofit organization in 2005. In 2006, GoAK paid workers and volunteers cleaned 350 miles of beaches in the Knight Island archipelago, hauling away 46 Dumpster containers of trash. Work continued in 2007 on Knight Island and Naked Island in Prince William Sound.

Marine debris lies in the forest behind the beach at Gore Point.

Photo by Michael Armstrong

This year, after surveying debris-filled beaches at Montague Island and Gore Point, GoAK got $115,000 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to clean up Gore Point  a beach with relatively less debris than Montague Island. REI kicked in $10,000, and the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies provided a $500 grant.

Gov. Sarah Palin vetoed a $150,000 state appropriation. Palin explained her veto of the cleanup as "not a state responsibility." Sharon Leighow, the governor's deputy press secretary, said Palin thought the program had merit and would support it if included in a future Alaska State Parks budget.

"She found the photos of the cleanup work very compelling," Leighow said. "It just came down to making the tough choices."

In one sense, Palin is right: the marine debris that washes up on Gore Point isn't only Alaskan. A few buoys from Alaska fisheries were found, and some trash  like plastic water bottles  came from shoreline recreation. But buckets, nets, drums and fishing gear came from international fisheries. Sandals, shoes and toys  including the mythical First Years Floatees ducks  from oceangoing container spills have washed up at Gore Point.

Gore Point's marine debris comes from what Curtis Ebbesmeyer  the Seattle oceanographer famous for tracking marine debris  calls "the eastern garbage patch," a gyre about the size of Texas that collects flotsam and jetsam from the North Pacific Ocean. In an article in the November 2003 Natural History, Charles Moore estimated that patch had 3 million tons of debris.

Chris Pallister, GoAK co-director, and his three sons, Eric, Kyler and Ryan, and Doug Leiser and his sons, Nick and Brian, had been working with Raynor since July 1. On July 7 Bree Murphy, project coordinator for the Center of Alaskan Coastal Studies, and Marlaina Thiel, a supervisor with the PRIDE Program at South Peninsula Behavioral Services, arrived to spend 10 days helping the Gulf of Alaska Keeper clean up tons of debris.

Volunteers had already cleaned up trash on the west beach, piling up about 30 bags and a string of buoys near the wreck of the F/V Ranger, owned by Robert Cousins, who has a collection of old boats on the Homer Spit.

The scale of trash was intimidating. One photograph couldn't show it all. Take a photo of a 10-yard long pile, walk on a bit, and there would be another 10-yard field of trash tangled in vegetation.

"My idea of going out there was to see more of Alaska's coastline," Thiel said. "What I found was Alaska's worst-kept secret."

It's a secret known to fishermen  and seen before during the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In 1989, oil slimed the beach, killing hundreds of murres, scoters and other sea birds. Cleaning up marine debris was a lesser concern  one former Homer News reporter Tom Kizzia still noted in a May 11, 1989, article.

"The mossy forest floor was thickly littered with Styrofoam fishing buoys and plastic bottles thrown across the beach in storms," Kizzia wrote. "Surf pounded the beach, pushing 6-inch-thick piles of golden goo up the sand."

While the pounding surf long ago buried or washed away oil, that storm-tossed debris remained  either replenished by new storms or never cleaned up.

Our their first day on the beach, Murphy and Thiel did what could best be called mining for debris. Driftwood jackstraws piled up on the beach in hills and valleys. It was easy to pick up bright orange buoys resting on logs, but the rest required climbing down into the logs. Removing a crumpled bucket meant delicately pulling out a puzzle of logs.

When sunny days turned to rain, the cleaning crew moved into the forest, rather than risk slipping on wet logs.

Ebbesmeyer, the Seattle oceanographer famous for tracking marine debris, says that every piece of flotsam tells a story. Who used that Holland America shampoo bottle? Where did that Alaska Axe deodorant spray can come from? How did a 9-pin vacuum tube make it from the Voshod plant in Kaluga, Russia, to Gore Point?

Beautiful Japanese glass floats were prized finds, but more interesting were the peculiar treasures, like an intact little light bulb Thiel found that made her wonder about its journey.

"It made it up under the beach, it made it up under this log under a handful of Styrofoam," she said. "It looked like you might be able to screw it into an outlet and it would still light."

Those kinds of stories drew writers. Charles Wohlforth, a freelance writer working on an Alaska Magazine story about marine debris, flew out for a day with his managing editor, Tim Woody. From New York, Donovan Hohn also visited.

Hohn wrote an article for the January Harper's Magazine, "Moby-Duck, or The Synthetic Wilderness of Childhood," about the First Years toys Ebbesmeyer has been tracking. Packaged sets of four toys  a duck, a frog, a beaver and a turtle  spilled into the North Pacific in January 1992. They've become legendary since first being written about in the Sitka Sentinel in late 1992. Hohn is writing a book for Bloomsbury USA to expand his article in Harper's. Among other things, he's visiting places in the world where the First Years toys have washed up.

Brian Leiser found a faded yellow duck a few days before Hohn's visit, and Hohn later found a cracked beige beaver.

By July 14, the entire outside beach had been cleaned to the smallest shred of plastic, and volunteers cleaned most of the forest.

On the last day, the Homer contingent took a boat over to the North Beach and collected maybe 40 bags of trash.

"The mess was so overwhelming," Thiel said. "The beach got so clean, though. ... To see it without all that stuff out there  that was really cool."

Pallister estimated the crew collected about 1,500 bags of trash, or 42,000 pounds of debris. By comparison, for last year's Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies annual CoastWalk cleanup, volunteers picked up 75 bags and 827 pounds of debris on 33 miles of Kachemak Bay beaches  part of the 7 million pounds collected during International Coastal Cleanup in 68 countries.

The vetoed state funds were to pay for getting the trash off the beach. With most of the trash on the east side of the isthmus, it would take an army of sherpas to carry it to the better anchorage on the west side. Pallister said the Marine Conservation Alliance Foundation has provided funding to sling the trash by helicopter across the isthmus and then have a landing craft haul it back to Homer.

Digging into plastic decades old, picking up Styrofoam that disintegrates into tiny beads but never goes away, gave a new perspective on civilization's effect on the environment. Just as the Exxon Valdez oil found a wilderness shore to foul, so millions of tons of debris floating in vast garbage patches hits otherwise pristine beaches.

"What I thought about a lot out there was consumption, our consumption of just stuff and its effect on your environment," Thiel said. "How could you not come away and think, goodness sakes, isn't there some other way we could do this?"

Raynor was more direct.

"The international community ought to hang its head in shame," he said of the tons of debris. "I just grab a bag and pick it up."

Michael Armstrong aided in the cleanup effort of Gore Point. He can be reached at michael.armstrong@homernews.com. For more information on Gulf of Alaska Keeper and its programs, visit www.goak.org. This story was distributed through Morris News Service  Alaska.